Improving internet response times can improve your closing ratios. Manufacturers are starting to put a huge emphasis on improving response times in 2010. Here are some tips on how to improve your internet response times.
1.    Text messages and email alerts - Immediately notify yourself when new leads are received
2.    Manually sending an email or logging a phone call attempt counts as a response. (Auto-responder emails don’t count.)
3.    Respond to leads from your smart phone if your CRM supports it
4.    Lead “buckets” - Don’t assign leads to any particular person but instead put them in a bucket and whichever sales rep gets to it first, gets it!
5.    Use a fully mobile enabled CRM system that allows you to view complete lead details, send emails and log phone calls.
6.    Unresponded lead alerts - Setup your CRM to email a manager if leads aren’t responded to within a certain timeframe.
7.    Alert prompts within your CRM – Receive popup no...

Originally published in AutoSuccess Magazine Oct. 2009

Over the past few years CRM usage in dealerships has greatly increased and is still a big priority for most dealerships. As internet leads became more and more important, it has become increasingly more important to have CRM solutions that were designed to efficiently handle internet leads. The problem a lot of dealers have is their CRM doesn’t do a very good job of handling internet leads. To remedy this problem, dealers purchase an Internet Lead Management (ILM) solution which is more or less a 2nd CRM solution designed only for internet leads. ILM software, unlike traditional CRM software, is typically web based since it is designed to handle internet leads.

Internet Lead Management (ILM) solutions are great for your internet department and have special functionality that makes it easy to handle internet leads. Some of these special functions include:

• Distributing and routing leads to your internet sales staff

Automated emails are very important to the success of your internet sales.

For starters, an immediate auto responder is nice because it lets the customer know they received the request. It builds confidence that the dealership will respond.

Auto responders also provide opportunity to provide information that they did not receive on the website they submitted the lead from. For example, your auto responder can automatically send pictures and brochures of the car they were interested in, links back to your website to view more info on that vehicle and even similar vehicles.

Take this screen shot below as an example. This is from a real internet lead from one of our customers just a few minutes ago. Someone submitted an eBay lead on this Jeep Wrangler. It is Sunday and the dealership is closed, but the system can respond with a whole wealth of information. Now instead of the customer having one reason to contact you, they might have 3 or 4 and have now clicked on all these links ...

 After playing with Windows 7 for the last 48 hours, my first reaction is this is what Vista should have been!  Overall, it isn't that much different than Windows Vista. If you have used Vista before, you will quickly be at home with Windows 7. Most of the changes are very subtle.
I was able to get my hands on the final Windows 7 release early because VinSolutions is a Microsoft Partner, so of course we get all the cool toys early. Windows 7 will be widely available October 22nd, 2009.
Windows 7 was designed to run on the netbooks that are all the rage these days. So it has been tweaked to be faster and use less RAM. It is noticeably snappier on my laptop and it comes out of hibernation much faster. The system requirements from Microsoft only say 1GB of RAM and a 1ghz processor. These are actually the same requirements Vista had, but Windows 7 should run a little faster than Vista did.
If the software you currently use works fine with Vista, you should be OK with upgrading...

If you want to get better at something, you first have to know how well you're doing, right?  How do you know how well you are doing? You have to be able to quantify it. Once you can quanity how you are doing, you can more effectively manage it.
CRM software is a great tool to monitor and measure the activity going on within your dealership. If you pull a showroom activity report and it says you are closing 90% of your ups, that doesn't mean you are doing a great job. It means your salespeople aren't using the system. Are they following up with the people that didn't buy that day? Could you sell more cars if they were?
If you want to improve how your store is performing, you have to get everyone using the CRM and use it's reporting to measure and track your success. Track your response times, closing ratios, appointment statistics and much more.
How can you manage what you can't measure? The problem is you don't know what you don't know.

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Chief Tec...

 
CRM success in your dealership depends on having the right people and processes.

Having the right people can sometimes be the most difficult part. CRM utilization has to come from the top down. The management team has to use the system and mandate that all the salespeople use it. If the management team doesn't use it, or have a bad attitude about it, how can you expect the salespeople to use it?

If your dealership doesn't have any processes in place, how can you expect anyone to follow them? I would define a process as a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and technology, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal.

Your dealership must define processes on how to handle internet leads, showroom leads, phone leads, unsold showroom visit follow up, lease renewals, appointment confirmations, and much more. Once you figure out these processes, you have to figure out how to use your CRM to accomplish your goals. Your CRM can ...

 
CRM technology isn't new. They all do the same thing, right? Manage tasks, schedule follow up calls, mail letters, and other basic things. Sure, they all do that by the year 2000 standards, but this is 2009! The CRM of 2009 can do so much more and do it much more intelligently.

CRM Technology for car dealers continues to rapidly change. The problem is, most car dealers don't even know about it. They are locked in to long term contracts. Contracts with products that in technology years would easily be considered dinosaurs.

The best way to purchase any type of software product is from a vendor that sells it as a monthly service with no contract or strings attached. You also want to ensure that the vendor is still heavily investing in the technology to continue improving it. Because the second they stop improving, is the second it becomes a dinosaur. You aren't looking for a vendor, you are looking for a partner.

I know several of the major CRM vendors who don't even have...

"Similar vehicles" is one of the best functions of a good CRM system. Here are a couple example of how you can use this excellent functionality.
 
Trying to do this manually would take forever and be nearly impossible. So it takes smart software to compare the year, make, model, bodystyle, price, mileage, engine, and all sorts of other factors to evaluate which vehicles are the closest matches.
Initial auto responders. Rarely do customers buy the car the inquired upon. So why not give them some more options right up front? More options to contact you and come to do your dealership?
In this example, the first vehicle is what they inquired upon, and the next 4 are similar vehicles. This same technology can be used to supply similar vehicles to a new car lead, or similar new cars on a pre-owned lead.

Unsold follow up - Weeks later the car they were interested is now gone. Why not send them some similar vehicles that you now have available?

Matt Watson
VinSol...

 
One of the positives and negatives with web based software is it can be accessed from anywhere. That means your CRM, Inventory, DMS and other databases are potentially accessible from anywhere in the world.
 
The positive is you can access the software programs from work, home, on vacation, or even on the beach. This is a great advantage to web based systems.
The negative is also the positive in this case. Disgruntled employees can login from home and people can attempt to hack your passwords from a far.
Shouldn't you restrict remote access to just a few computers in your dealership and just a few people who work remotely? Of course the answer is YES!
Web based software can be secured by limiting the IP addresses that are authorized to login to the system. Think of it like using a firewall to guard your web available databases. Authorizing only the IP address of your dealership can ensure nobody is accessing the system from home that shouldn't be. You could then exclu...

One of my favorite sayings is "Persistence Wears Down Resistance"

I feel like this saying pretty much sums up SEO. SEO takes a lot of persistence and effort to see big results over a long period of time.

7 months ago our corporate website was ranked #33 on Google for one of the most important key phrases for our company. Today, we are now #1 or #2 depending on the day you search. We are ranked above all of our competitors, and even Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

It just goes to show that anything is possible with a little persistence!


Matt Watson
CTO

http://www.VinSolutions.com





...

After 2 days of release, about 2% of web traffic is via Internet Explorer 8. Compare that to the release of Firefox 3.0 and it makes you wonder if anyone even cares about IE8. After 3 days of the release of Firefox 3.0, it accounted for an amazing 19% of all web traffic.


View the stats here

So what does this mean?

Does it mean that no one is excited about IE8? (I installed it the first day, and had been testing the beta version)

Or does it mean that Firefox users are just much more progressive than the typical IE user?

I'm going to guess that Firefox users are much more sophisticated/power Internet users. IE8 is more of a defensive/catch up release by Microsoft, and not really a revolutionary step forward. IE's marketshare has fallen to about 67% and IE8 is not going to bring the other 33% back. At best Microsoft can hope it will just prevent further loss in market share.

Or... Does it really matter what browser we use anymore?

I would say no it doesn't. IE8, Fir...

Someone recently was concerned about the CRM/ILM tool they use and about how their emails were not getting delivered. So it got me thinking about this some more and I started doing some research. I won't name names but I have looked at several common CRM/ILM tools that dealers use and found that most of them had bad reputation scores as email senders.


About 80-90% of all emails sent are SPAM. Since real emails are the exception to the norm, email providers employ a lot of measures to prevent SPAM. Nobody likes Viagra ads, scams, and porn piling up in their email.
How does the content of the email effect its SPAM ratings?
Most large ISPs don't even care about the subject or content of an email. They rely solely on the reputation of the IP address of the sender. A long time ago the content of the email was very important in SPAM calculations. Some ISPs do still look at it, most importantly Hotmail based on some information I am seeing.
So what effects the reputation of an email ...

My last post was about a common myth about search engines: "Search Engines Love Video"
Search engines don't love video, they love popular websites. YouTube is one of the most popular websites there is and it has a very high Google Page Rank. So any content created on the site stands a good chance to rank well in the search engines. Simply putting a video on a webpage alone doesn't make google love it.
"Video SEO" is really using video to create content on YouTube. There are two main reasons every dealership in the country should use YouTube:
1. YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine there is. It gets more searches daily than Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all others except for Google. So there are a lot of users searching for virtually anything. You need to get your products and your dealership in front of those millions of users. Luckily YouTube will let you do it FOR FREE.
2. Posting videos on YouTube has some intrinsic indirect SEO benefits. Listing vide...

If you do some searching around Google for phrases like “city name year make model” you will find search engine listings of videos. I hear all the time about how search engines love video and rank pages with video higher over other content.


This is simply a myth and not true.

Web pages don't rank higher because they contain video. They rank higher because of other SEO reasons.
Google spiders web pages and ranks them on primarily 4 factors in no particular order:
1. Page titles
2. Page content
3. Back links (how many people link to your page?)
4. Google Page Rank
So why do web pages on YouTube.com rank so highly in search rankings?
Two simple reasons:
1.YouTube.com has a Google Page Rank of 9
2.YouTube.com has millions of back links to it
YouTube videos ranks well because of these SEO factors of course, not because the pages have video on them. Videos are embedded on websites using OBJECT tags. Tags that I highly doubt the search engines even pay attention...

 
If your dealership is buying leads from your OEM or 3rd party vendor, then one of the best ways to save money is through what I would call “Bad Lead Reporting & Rejection”. This functionality is available as part of some ILM/CRM solutions. If you purchase a lot of leads, it can potentially save you enough money to purchase your ILM/CRM solution.

OK, so what is Bad Lead Reporting & Rejection?
Bad lead rejection can save you money on duplicate leads, leads with no or bad contact information, under age leads, bogus leads, etc, etc. If you are buying leads at $15-$30 a shot, the savings adds up very quickly.
Lead aggregators try to weed out duplicate leads, but aren't aware of what other lead providers are sending you. They don't try to send you duplicate leads, but they also want to sell you as many leads as they can. So it puts the responsibility on you to report duplicate leads and ask for refunds when appropriate.
Most lead suppliers will gladly refund...

From time to time I go to different dealers websites and submit leads because I'm curious about what ILM/CRM software they use and/or what they are doing for their lead follow up process. So I get random emails all the time.
Yesterday I got an email from a dealership in New York (screen shot of email at the bottom). It was just blank! Why? Because gmail and most email programs don't show images unless you click the "display images" button. (more about this below)
After I click the button to display the images it showed me one image that was 768 kilobytes. Yikes!
So there are some serious problems with taking your beautiful print ad and simply slapping it an email and blasting it to your entire customer base.
1. Email clients don't show images by default (more about why this is next)
2. If there are only images and they can't be seen, your email will look blank and quickly be discarded by the reader.
3. A lot of people check their email on their phones. So you need to se...

A sitemap is how you tell search engines what pages are available for crawling on your website. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the urls for your website.
Sitemaps are not required, and search engines will spider your website with or without one. However, sitemaps allow you to tell search engines specific pages you want spidered that they perhaps couldn't find otherwise. This is very important, especially if your website uses a lot of Flash, Silverlight, javascript, or frames. Most dealer websites do use a lot of these technologies. Your sitemap can also tell the search engines how often to spider your website and when your website content has changed.
Sitemaps should also by dynamic (changed daily!), and not a static file created once in a while by your website or SEO provider. Your sitemap should include all the URLs to your inventory detail pages. This will allow search engines to spider your inventory detail pages which will help with your SEO on long tail search key phra...

Part 2 - "RSS & Data Syndication"
Perhaps one of the best technologies to become popular over the last few years is RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS provides a simple way to subscribe to information being syndicated. This provides a way to receive updates when new information is available without having to check a website over and over looking for new information. For example, if you wanted to be notified on a daily basis what the weather was going to be the next few days, you could subscribe to a RSS feed from Weather.com.
Ok, so RSS sounds useful, how do I subscribe to RSS news feeds?
There are a lot of programs available to subscribe to RSS news feeds. Here are some that I recommend:
Google Reader
Microsoft Outlook 2007
RSS Bandit
I personally use Google Reader and I highly recommend it. I currently subscribe to about 30 feeds with it.
Some example of common RSS feeds
CNN.com News
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
Weather ....

“Web 2.0” is a buzzword used all over the place these days. So what does it mean? Web 2.0 actually means a lot of different things and it means different things to different people. This is the first of a multi-part series attempting to define Web 2.0. Follow my blog at
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/mwatson/ for future posts.
Part 1 - “We're Talking Back”
One definition of Web 2.0 is the ability for everyday people to change the Internet.
A few years ago the Internet was mostly created by businesses for shopping, news, travel, research, forums and other important things. The Internet was largely a “read only” collection of information where everyday people had no input.
Today, a very large percentage of the content on the Internet is created by everyday people. Wikipedia, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and dozens of other websites are all based on content created by every day people. We now have the ability to create our own web pages (ex...

Anyone who uses a CRM system that prints on plain paper via a laser printer can probably already create digital documents today. Most people probably just don't know how to.
If you're using pre-printed forms, then you can't create digital docs from those of course. (As a side note, you might consider switching to forms printed via a laser printer to save yourself some money.)
So how do you use your current CRM to create "digital documents" you can email to a customer?
Easily! If you can print the form, you can create a digital copy. If your CRM exports the forms to a PDF to print, well then simply click the save button and email the files. If not, then you can install a utility like Adobe (not reader edition) or dopdf (there are other products like this) to print to a PDF that can then be saved and emailed.
So the key is... any document that can be printed on a laser printer can be printed to a PDF and emailed, even if it isn't a PDF (using programs like Adobe,...

The problem with most software in the automotive industry is the lack of integration between products. Products that if used together, could do very intelligent things.
Dealers purchase what I call “singular” solutions from vendors that only do one thing and doesn't integrate with anything else.
I hear it from managers and salespeople all the time. “We have all these different passwords to get into different systems just so we can sell a car. Don’t get me wrong, we need all of these systems, we just wish it could be easier. We login to the CRM to add a customer, than login to our trade appraisal system, then login to another system to desk a deal, then another to pull credit, it just doesn’t stop.”
Think about your website and CRM for a second. Every dealer wants the pictures of their salespeople and managers on their website. Well, most dealers put those pictures in their CRM to email in the signature of their emails.
Wouldn't it be nice to add ...

Users can now customize their own search results on Google. Select what they think was most relevant and remove listings they thought weren't useful. I can only imagine how google will track and use this in their ranking algorithms. If more people vote your listing up then down and that ratio is more positive compared to other listings, you may find your listing above everyone else in the near future.


Copied from Google's blog post:

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.

Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and ...

Since 1954, American automobile manufacturers have used a vehicle identification number (V.I.N.) to describe and identify motor vehicles. The early VINs came in a wide array of configurations and variations, depending on the individual manufacturer. Beginning with model year (MY)1981, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required that all over-the-road-vehicles sold must contain a 17-character VIN. This standard established a fixed VIN format.
So let's dissect a VIN

The first 3 digits define the manufacturer. The first of these digits is usually the country of origin. For example, all VINs that start with J are producted in Japan and those that stat with W are Germany. Characters 4 through 8 are specific to that manufacturer's model for a given model year. The 9th digit is a check digit. VINs can actually be validated through a mathematical formula to ensure they are valid. The 10th digit is a year. For example, an 8 is for 2008, 7 is for 2007 The 11th digit is f...

What is Video SEO?
Google ranks video content from YouTube, AOL and others very high in their rankings. By posting videos on YouTube, you can easily gain additional exposure for your dealership, at NO COST!


How about some examples?
Search Google for "2009 Buick LaCrosse Roxboro". The top 6 rankings are all from a video posted on YouTube that was the re-published to additional websites by YouTube as well.
Search Google for "2004 Dodge Durango Indianapolis". Top ranking is a YouTube video on Aol Autos.
You can use your pre-owned inventory to compete for dozens of keywords that you would normally not be able to compete for.


So how do I do it?
Sign up for a free Youtube account and start uploading videos. The trick though comes with the proper titles, descriptions, and keywords of your videos. (VinSolutions software will automatically optimize that for you.). You can record digital video with most any snapshot or video camera these days.


What is...

Microsoft announced today (October 13th) that Silverlight 2.0 would be officially released to the world tomorrow (October 14th).
Take a minute tomorrow and visit http://www.silverlight.net to install it!
Fore more information check out my last post:
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/mwatson/2008/10/10/silverlight-the-next-generation-of-automotive-software/
In the next 60 days we will be releasing major enhanacements to our automotive CRM system that were developed in Silverlight from the ground up to take advantage of what it can do....

For those of you who have never heard of Silverlight, you should consider taking a few minutes to learn a little about it. Silverlight will be on websites everywhere in the near future.

Silverlight is a new technology from Microsoft. Silverlight is a next generation enterprise platform for creating "rich internet applications". In many ways, Silverlight is similar to Adobe Flash which is used on a lot of websites today. The big difference between Silverlight and Flash is the underlying development tools and technology used to develop the software. Silverlight has superior development tools for creating enterprise applications. Silverlight is a small browser plug-in that has be installed on your computer like Flash. 

So will Silverlight replace Flash? In the long run it could, but in the short term Silverlight will find its home primarily in online software applications. Over time Silverlight will make its way to more universal consumer uses once it becomes more c...

Digital Dealer in Dallas was yet again another huge success for VinSolutions
.
We heard a lot of positive feedback from dealers about the diverse training sessions they attended. Many of the dealers we met with had been to previous Digital Dealer shows. A testimate to the value the dealers find in attending the shows.

 
It is great to have the opportunity to meet with a large group of our existings customers twice a year at the Digital Dealer shows. It gives us a chance to talk to them about what they love about our software, and things they would like to see us improve in the future. Heck, a lot of our customers came by and got some free training at the show on our products!


Digital Dealer provides us a great opportunity to showcase our Automotive CRM, inventory management, and custom dealer websites to dealerships from all over the country. VinSolutions has attended all 5 of the Digital Dealer shows and plans on attending #6 in Las Vegas next spring.




...

I think dealers and website companies seem to put too much focus on optimizing only the dealer's home page and not the rest of the pages on their website.
Some dealers load up their home page and make it sort of ugly just to add keywords and content to it. What about just putting all that content on an "About Us" page that says what you do? That page will get indexed as well.
For example, search "deery brothers" on Google and you'll notice their home page is #1, but #2 is their "About Us" page which is full of great content, along with their home page.
http://www.deerybrothers.com/AboutUs-MasterPage.aspx

For a non dealer website example, search google for "dealer crm" and http://www.VinSolutions.com/crm.aspx comes up #2. Notice it doesn't link to our home page... Actually, our home page has no text at all on it! It doesn't need to... our website isn't a ONE PAGE website.
I guess my only point is, don't be stuck in the mindset that your ho...